


all roads lead to rome

by beeclaws



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon-Typical Jon's Childhood, Canon-Typical Past Bullying, Canon-Typical Threat to Children, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Elias Bouchard Being a Bastard, Emotional Manipulation, Episode: e081 A Guest for Mr. Spider (The Magnus Archives), Gen, Hurt/The Beholding-style Comfort (which is terrible), Implied/Referenced Child Neglect, Insomnia, One Shot, Pre-Canon, baby jon wanders off like it's an olympic sport
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:15:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25019128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beeclaws/pseuds/beeclaws
Summary: Eight-year-old Jon finds himself being taken to London, to give a statement about his recent experiences. He gets slightly more than he bargained for.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 23
Kudos: 299





	all roads lead to rome

Three weeks after Jon reads _A Guest for Mr Spider,_ he finds himself in a dusty waiting room three trains and a bus ride from home. 

His grandmother is in the next room over, and Jon can see through the half-open doorway that she is still and quiet as she waits for the assistant to fumble through filing cabinets, but nonetheless is managing to clearly project her impatience. Jon has seen very few people fail to be rattled by his grandmother’s quiet disapproval of the speed at which they go about life, and he suspects they were the kind of people who made a point to never seem rattled regardless of how they felt on the inside. Jon thinks he would like to be one of those people, but the best he has managed so far is scowling when he feels like screaming.

“We so rarely take statements from minors, you see,” the assistant is trying to explain. “There are different forms - for consent, and everything. I’m sure they’re around here somewhere.”

Jon shifts in his seat, eyes scanning the dingy office and the several ajar doors leading out. There isn’t anything in this room to read - all the tantalizing loose papers are in the room occupied by Jon’s grandmother and the increasingly harried assistant, and he has learned by now that people do not like it when he goes through their things in front of them. 

He has to do something, though. He finished his book on the second train, despite the distractions of the shifting landscapes outside, craggy outcroppings of rock giving way to tight rows of terraced houses arranged on steep hillsides. He had not been allowed to bring more books, or go to a bookshop before their visit to this strange institute. He had been told quite firmly that whether they visited a bookshop after would depend upon his behaviour during the visit. 

Jon is suspicious of this promise, as he can’t imagine being granted such a boon during a six hour round-trip his grandmother was irate at needing to take to begin with, but he has not been able to keep himself from hoping. He sleeps fitfully these days, with the same long-legged dreams playing on repeat, but during his waking hours he has comforted himself with daydreams of grand London bookshops.

All the books in the world later, however, do nothing to help Jon’s boredom now. His grandmother has informed him often that those with truly rich minds rarely become bored, as they can entertain themselves wherever they are. The little flare of anger Jon feels on remembering this provides him only a moment’s distraction, and he shifts in his seat, feeling the outcome coming even before he begins to stand and head for a doorway. The quiet sameness of the room around him, the lack of anything to tune into and provide himself with a rhythm, a path to follow mentally - it had been hard to bear even before _A Guest for Mr Spider_ provided him with such rich material to stew on. 

No one notices him leave. The door opens silently, and leads Jon into a fascinating mess of corridors. _Institute_ was a curiously vague word in itself, and his repeated questions to his grandmother regarding what this place was and why they were going there had yielded many chastisements and only one actual answer: _they’re just going to talk to you about what you think you saw the other week._ This made Jon think of counsellors, but the building he walks through now has none of the clean, sterile trappings of a clinical setting, and why would they need to go all the way to London to find a counsellor? 

Jon wants the bookshop visit very badly, but he also knows deep down that he has never once been deemed to have actually been on his ‘best behaviour’ when asked to be, and is beginning to suspect he is somehow fundamentally incapable of achieving whatever state this phrase points toward. He knows he will probably be dragged straight back to the train station after this, his grandmother’s hand hovering ready to grab the collar of his shirt at the slightest sign of him wandering off ( _last thing I need is you getting on the wrong train and ending up in bloody Aberdeen)_ . So, he may as well decide to settle for second best now, and see what he can discover on his own before someone drags him back to a room to talk about the things he ‘thinks he saw’ _._

What he has discovered currently is a door intriguingly labelled _Artifact Storage_. He peeks inside to find a blessedly empty reception desk. Walking in a little further, he can see a long walkway with various rooms branching off. He wiggles the mouse at the reception computer to dismiss the screensaver, hoping for some sort of catalogue that could help him narrow down what to look at first, but he’s greeted with a password-protected lockscreen. 

Jon moves off down the walkway, reflecting that he quite enjoys exploring the old-fashioned way anyway. It makes this feel less like a walk through an eccentric office and more like a quest, even as a voice in his head chides him for being childish. 

The first two doors he encounters are locked tight. The second pair are also locked, but have a glass windowpane that Jon can just about see through if he stands on his tiptoes. Inside is a clean, white room with a book on a plinth. It’s a satisfyingly old-looking book, at least, but Jon can’t even make out the title from this distance, and no amount of pulling at the door handle is making the room any less locked. 

Jon scowls, turning to try the next door, resolving to speed through the rest of them quickly and go and find something more interesting, and almost loses his balance when the door swings open immediately. It’s another mostly-empty, white-walled room. This time, the contents are a small, raised display case with something small and dark glinting inside.

Jon adjusts his glasses as he approaches, a familiar flash of irritated helplessness running through him at how fuzzy his vision has become. He’s been asking about going to the Optician’s for weeks, but the local one keeps odd hours and his grandmother hates to drive, and then he’d watched a boy disappear forever and had so much more to ask for than new glasses. 

When he gets close enough, he sees that what’s inside is a wristwatch, laid flat inside the glass case. It’s ornate enough that Jon would find it noteworthy if he saw someone wearing it, but hardly the kind of thing people prized enough to place in exhibits like this. The metal casing is a mottled brass with somewhat muddled etchings, the pattern resembling a spiral but seeming to break off and twist unpredictably. The more he looks, the less he can follow the path the engraved lines follow, and his head swims as he turns his gaze to the hands instead, curious if something deemed an _artifact_ would still tell the time correctly. 

“Quite a lovely piece, don’t you think?” says a quiet voice from behind him, and Jon immediately swivels around. A prim, ageless sort of man in a neat waistcoat is smiling blandly at him, but with a sharp, almost amused look in his eyes. 

Jon swallows, trying to summon some words. He’d think getting caught out like this so many times might have made him more prepared for the next occasion, but somehow it never did.

“Let me guess,” the man says, strolling closer and holding out a hand for Jon to shake. “Jonathan Sims?”

“Yes,” Jon admits, hesitantly reaching up to return the handshake. His own hand feels warm and pudgy meeting the cold, delicate clasp. “Are - are they looking for me?”

“I suspect they’re about to, if they aren’t already,” the man replies, though he seems unconcerned. “But forgive me; I should have introduced myself. My name is Elias Bouchard.”

Jon nods, which he hopes is an acceptable response. He’s not used to the people who catch him wandering being so polite about it - though the forestry employee at the National Park last summer had quite agreeably explained the workings of the local ecosystem to him while he waited for his grandmother to come and collect him.

“Shall I escort you back to the Archives?” Elias asks, something almost conspiratorial in his manner.

Jon nods again, but doesn’t actually move. He half turns back to the mysterious display case. “What - what is that?” he asks. He had been trying out different methods of getting adults to actually answer his questions, and getting straight to the point was proving slightly more successful than explaining all the reasons why he wanted to know; he was rarely allowed to get through all of them before being swept back to wherever he was supposed to be.

“A watch,” Elias answers. Jon frowns, then immediately tries to smooth his expression out again. That tiny, conspiratorial smile plays once again over Elias’ face.

“But why is it in a case, in its own room?”

“It’s an interesting watch.”

Jon scowls. Elias seems oddly pleased, though Jon can’t tell if it’s anything to do with him or not - he has the air of someone constantly tracing patterns in the air that no one else can see.

“Why don’t you accompany me upstairs?” he asks. “I can have my assistant contact the Archives to let them know where you’ve gone, and you can give your statement to me. It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to engage with the more…practical aspects of the Institute.”

Jon is not sure he really understands what’s being offered to him or why, but he finds himself saying yes. He’d gone wandering looking for distractions, looking for new questions to fill his mind, and he sensed he’d be more likely to continue getting them if he followed behind Elias.

Elias leads him back through the maze of corridors in silence. Jon tells himself not to push his luck by asking more questions, and then proceeds to anyway - he’d pushed his luck already by leaving the waiting room, and that had already proved to be interesting, at least. 

“What is a statement?” Jon asks, then frowns at how he must sound. “I mean - I know, obviously, it’s something you say, but…”

“I find a practical demonstration is usually best,” Elias answers, but then turns back slightly and grants Jon a little more of his attention. “In essence, though: I want to know what you’ve seen.”

There’s a weight in Jon’s chest, and for a moment it’s difficult to breathe. He thinks this must have been what he had been waiting for; someone to look him in the eyes and say yes, you’ve seen something. He has a story worth telling, a story that had pulled apart the fixed points of understanding in his world. The wrongness of having been changed so fundamentally, and yet had nothing around him change in response, no calculable reaction to the quiet violence of that boy being stolen away forever - Jon needs someone to fix that. There’s a guilt somewhere deep down that he thinks he needs someone to fix that more than he needs that boy alive again. The words echo in his mind: _I want to know what you’ve seen._

Elias stops before one final doorway and greets the young woman sitting at a desk. “Could you phone down to the Archives and let them know I have young Mr Sims with me to give his statement? His grandmother can collect him from here once we’re finished.”

Something like surprise crosses the woman’s face, but Jon is led into Elias’ office before she’s finished dialing. Jon notes that Elias’ phrasing made it sound as though Elias had collected him in order for him to give this statement, rather than that Jon had wandered off and been intercepted. He wonders if that’s an intentional gift. Elias, thus far, does not seem overly kind, but it’s hardly the first time Jon’s been granted a reprieve from someone unkind; less than a month ago, a boy who hated him had died in his place.

Elias’ office is almost distressingly normal. While the rest of the Institute has a kind of dusty, run-down feel, a combination of age and neglect, Elias’ office feels crisply modern, like Jon has stepped through time. Elias gestures for him to take a seat, retrieves a cassette player from a desk drawer, then draws up a chair across from Jon, but on the same side of the desk - Jon isn’t sure whether he wanted that buffer between them, whether the formality would make him more or less likely to lose his words and do something awful like cry. 

The tape recorder clicks on while Jon is still hunched over and thinking, though he isn’t sure if he actually saw Elias press anything.

“Now, Jon,” Elias says. “Can you tell me the subject of your statement today?”

Jon wants to ask for clarification and also desperately doesn’t, because this man said he wanted to listen to him and Jon doesn’t want to ruin that by revealing that all this talk about statements still doesn’t fully make sense to him.

“That is,” Elias continues, as though he was merely pausing for thought himself, “could you summarise what it is you encountered that led to you coming here today?”

Jon swallows. He doesn’t think he can look at Elias, so he keeps his gaze on the tape recorder. “A book about a spider,” he answers, slow and quiet, though the words still seem to carry a terrible weight to them.

“Statement of Jonathan Sims, regarding a book about a spider. Statement taken direct from subject, 2nd October 1996. Statement begins.”

The crackling hum of the tape turning is all Jon can hear for a moment, more soothing than silence, less overwhelming than the roar of the trains on the long journey here. He thinks he’s going to freeze again, need Elias to provide some other prompt, but instead he starts to tell him the whole story - the book, how he came to have it, his grandmothers’ raiding of charity shops, and every terrible line of text that he can still see as though it were written on his own skin. 

Jon had made notes, in the days following his almost-complete reading of _A Guest for Mr Spider_. He hadn’t needed to write down any of the book’s narration itself, as he’d relived every page countless times while staring sleepless at his bedroom walls, seeing instead the careful arc of silvered webs clutched among the spider’s legs. _IT IS POLITE TO KNOCK._

His notes had been more focused on his attempts to understand the mundane facts of what had happened to him, since the larger picture of it gave him nothing but wordless, impenetrable terror. He’d made notes on how far he could have walked from the park within the elapsed time, the number of streets within that vicinity, and tracked his unsuccessful attempts to find the house again. He had tried to be scientific, academic.

The story he tells Elias is not scientific. He tells him how he hates to be given picture books; tells him how that boy whose name is a hole in his mind had always mocked and sometimes beaten him; tells him exactly what it looked like when he was drawn slowly, savouringly into that door. 

He uses words he is not entirely sure he knew before he stepped into that office. He does not cry. The story climbs out of him like unspooling twine, while Elias looks on and the cassette’s wheels spin. _Is it yours now?_ he thinks, as his story comes to an end. _Have I given it away?_

Elias does not switch off the tape recorder. He sits in quiet thought, seeming, if anything, more relaxed than when they had begun. 

“Do you believe me?” Jon asks quietly. 

“Yes,” Elias replies. 

Just like with the watch, he gives Jon nothing further. Jon has a sense he is being watched in order to determine what move he will make next; conversations often felt like choreographed events for which everyone except Jon had been provided with a script, but the character of this expectation was somehow different. Jon senses that if he can navigate this conversation correctly, there will be something waiting for him at the end, something more than escaping unscolded.

“What happens now?”

“For the Institute?” Elias asks. “We undertake some attempt to follow up your statement - not that there will be a great deal to verify in this case, besides the identity and disappearance of the young man in question.”

Jon doesn’t wince at Elias’ words, but it’s a close thing. Hearing that disappeared boy spoken of in that cold, clipped tone - a flash of rage rises in Jon’s chest, then falls into exhaustion before he can even begin to articulate what was wrong. “What about the book?” he asks instead.

Elias gives him a brief, appraising look. “It is unlikely to resurface for quite some time - and when it does, it will be chasing new victims.” Jon nearly flinches at that, too, though he has no idea why. “It isn’t coming back,” Elias adds, voice still calm and level. “Not for you.”

Jon wants to cry. He wants to be picked up and carried away from all of this, wants all the coddling and lack of control he usually loathes. He doesn’t stop asking questions.

“Has it-” He stops, hearing a tremble in his voice and swallowing hard before he tries again. “Do you know that because - because this has happened to other people?”

“Yes.”

“Are there other statements about it?”

“Yes.”

“Can I see them?”

Elias stays silent for a long moment. “Do you really want to?”

Jon is distantly aware that he’s shaking ever so slightly in his chair. He remembers the violence oozing from that book; the spider’s cartoonishly awful legs reaching out into the real world, into Jon’s world; the ghost of terrible hunger he’d felt seeing how Mr Spider looked at those trembling, waiting flies. The tape still spins between them. A voice inside of Jon yells out: _no, no, no._

“Yes,” Jon says.

“I can’t allow it, I’m afraid,” Elias says. Jon sits in helpless silence for a moment, and as he does so Elias rises from his seat and walks swiftly back behind the desk. The tape recorder still spins between them, but Jon has a sense of something ending regardless. Elias’ previously sharp, calculating gaze has gone vague, as if in the world of his mind Jon has already left the room. Jon runs through Elias’ words in his mind once again, and a new sense of wrongness snags at him.

“But...what are you going to do?” Jon asks. He knows he doesn’t sound any of the ways he wants to sound; not an explorer, not an academic, not someone wise or brave beyond their years. He sounds like a lost child begging for someone to show him the way home.

Elias gives him a brief, unconcerned look. “As I said, some rudimentary follow up will be carried out. Your statement will be stored within the Archives. That’s really all there is to it.”

“But...but you believe me,” Jon says.

“Yes.”

“It...it killed someone. It killed someone and now you know about it.”

“Yes,” Elias says again, reshuffling neat piles of papers on his desk. Jon feels another shock of helpless anger and rises to his feet.

“So you have to do something,” Jon says. Even in rage, he knows he sounds plaintive at best. “Someone died. Even if...even if no one can help him, you said the book will resurface eventually. You have to…”

Jon trails off. Elias flicks his eyes from the papers on his desk to his elegant silver wristwatch, a seeming not so much annoyed but wearied. “Why haven’t you done something?” he asks eventually.

“Because...because no one would believe me,” Jon says. “And I can’t find the house again, the one where he disappeared. I’ve looked.” He looks down at his shoes. “No one would believe me,” he says again, quieter. “Even my grandmother only brought me here because I wouldn’t sleep anymore, and she wanted someone else to tell me it wasn’t real.”

Elias doesn’t reply, and Jon’s eyes start to burn. “I can’t just go back home,” he adds, trying to will his voice to stop trembling.

“Why not?” Elias asks, finally looking up at Jon again. Jon feels another certainty torn away, like broken strands of web. “As I said, this particular book is very unlikely to strike in the same place on more than one occasion. We here at the Institute do not require anything further from you now that you have given your statement. And there is a reasonable chance you could live out your years without ever having cause to step foot in our halls again.”

They stand for a moment in terrible silence. Jon’s heart is pounding so loudly he wonders if it will be audible on the tape.

“There is, in theory, nothing to stop you from simply...going on as you were.” Elias gives a minuscule shrug, something like distaste crossing his face. “What precisely that will look like is, of course, up to you.”

Jon’s hands close into fists behind his back. “Someone died,” he says again. Elias is impassive. “I’m only alive because it took him instead.”

“So?”

Jon turns away for a second to furiously scrub tears from his face. This wasn’t...he’d never imagined this.

As if Elias senses his thoughts, he remarks, “would you rather I had called you a liar? Told you you were making up tall tales for attention, and to run along home?”

“Yes,” Jon chokes out. “At least then you’d be...at least the people who don’t believe me don’t _know_ , and have...have offices and resources and money, and _know_ it’s real, and just sit here anyway.”

Elias gives a soft sigh. “You want us to...send in the cavalry, is that it?”

“You have to do something,” Jon repeats. “Someone has to do _something_.”

“Will that let you sleep at night?” Elias asks, and the words cut into Jon despite the sudden softness of his tone. “Did you come here for justice, Jonathan, or for answers? Do you really want that young man avenged, or do you just want me to tell you the spider was a ‘level three entity’ that can be repelled by salt and lavender, place it in some neat little box to make the whole experience easier to swallow?”

For a second Jon sees a tiny, mean smile on Elias’s face, then he blinks and it’s gone without a trace. Jon clenches his fists again, not hiding them behind his back this time. “Both,” he says quietly. “If you’re offering.”

Elias huffs. “I have been investigating these kinds of matters for...a very long time, Jonathan, searching sources of knowledge most people will never even dream of, and I have never discovered one ounce of justice.”

“Maybe you weren’t looking hard enough,” Jon murmurs. His head hurts from holding back tears, from weeks of staring wide-eyed at his bedroom walls trying not to succumb to sleep, from the sheer weight of the terror he’s been carrying around since his hand landed on that book. For a moment he wants nothing more than to run out of that office and never look back, but he turns back to Elias one more time, whose attention has now fully shifted to the papers in front of him, making neat, unreadable annotations in fountain pen. “So that’s it, then?” Jon asks. “I have to just...go home, and know about it, and not do anything.”

“I don’t believe that’s what I said,” Elias replies mildly. Jon blinks at him. Elias gives another quiet sigh, as if Jon is a frustratingly slow pupil. “I said there was, in theory, nothing to stop you from simply leaving this place and carrying on with your previous existence.”

Jon swallows. “What’s the other option?”

Elias looks up at him, just for a moment. “You could start asking the right questions.”

Jon looks down at the crisp angular patterns of the carpet and tries to gather himself. Underneath his anger, he cannot shake the sense that there is something waiting at the end of this conversation, if he does it right. Elias does not seem like a man who will wait forever for him to find the right path, or endure too many wrong questions before sending him away. Jon needs to get this right, so he locks away his anger as best he can, just as he’s seen his grandmother do a thousand times, and tries to think.

“There are other things - things like…” He cuts himself off, scowling at his own lack of coherence. “There are other monsters, aren’t there?”

“Have you seen them?” Elias asks, tone unreadable.

“No,” Jon says. “But - you wouldn’t have believed me if it was just this one. And - and that book said ‘from the library of Jurgen Leitner,’” Jon continues, understanding arcing through his mind like lightning. “Libraries have more than one book. More than one book that would...belong next to that one.”

Elias gives an almost imperceptible nod. “And?”

“And you know about them,” Jon says. “You know enough to...to know whether or not to believe someone, when they give a statement. And enough to want statements in the first place - to know they aren’t all lies.”

“Say all of that is true,” Elias says, his casual tone undercut by the sharp gleam in his eyes. “What is it that you wish to ask?”

Jon takes one more breath, considering carefully even as he can feel the shape of the question rising in him already. He is still terrified, fear just as intense as it had been since that tape recorder clicked on. Since he turned that book over in his hands. He’s still angry, an anger that will reduce him to incoherence if he lets it, at Elias’s cold complacency - at the idea that anyone could see the things Jon has seen, feel the terror they brought, and not feel a desperate urge to act. 

Almost as often as Jon dreams of Mr Spider and his terrible hunger, he dreams of running up behind the boy as he walked away with the book, delivering a swift kick that makes him double over just a little, snatching the book from his hands and running, running, running. In his dreams, he is just fast enough, the boy just dazed enough, that he gets away with it, makes it all the way to the cliffs and drops the book down beneath the water. Jon knows that in reality, dreams take place in a handful of minutes, tiny flashes of impressions tricking the mind into thinking hours have passed. When he stares down at that book vanishing into dark water, though, he swears he really does dream of it for hours. He watches it sink down below the current, blurring, lessening, an ache in his lungs from running so far for so long, an ache in his neck from staring down, down, on and on. 

Jon wants this world so badly, and cannot trust anyone who wouldn’t. But as long as he stands in this office, in this strange building with its twisting halls, he is at least not alone in his knowledge of the world’s horrors. And something in that place whispers to him that even if it was far, far too late to snatch that book away and throw it from the cliffs, someday his fear of it could become something small and comprehensible enough to hold in his hands. It whispers that one day he could take that fear and hold it beneath the surface of cold, deep water, ever-present but muted and muffled, visible primarily in the neat fragments of light it cast over the surface. 

It’s something. It’s the only thing Jon’s been offered so far that’s made him capable of imagining a future at all, in this world of monsters and stolen lives.

“I want to do that too,” Jon says slowly. “Know about the monsters. Where they come from, how they work.” His gaze shifts from the tape recorder up to Elias’ smooth, unreadable expression. “How do I do that?” Jon asks.

Elias’ expression does not visibly change, but he places the lid on his pen and sets it down, places his notes to the side, and sits forward to finally, finally, give Jon his full attention. “The initial work will concern developing the right sort of mind,” he says, his eyes not leaving Jon’s. “Learn voraciously, even when you are afraid of the answers your questions might bring. Especially when you are afraid. That creature, it frightened you, but you still sought out the house where the book disappeared. You still tried to go back, to see if you could learn more.”

Jon isn’t sure if that is why he went back, but he hangs on Elias’ every word. 

“That is a promising beginning,” Elias continues. “If you are meant to do this kind of work, that impulse will return to you, over and over, and you will follow it above all else.”

Elias pauses and smiles faintly to himself. Jon realises he is still shaking.

“But I am getting...carried away,” Elias says. “Speaking too concretely of the journey ahead risks...polluting the results.”

Jon has to swallow several times before he can speak. “What then?” he asks. “After I...develop the right sort of mind. What happens then?”

In answer, Elias reaches into a pocket and pulls out a small, silvery business card, sliding it across the desk to Jon. Jon reaches out to take it, hoping Elias does not notice the fine tremble running through his hand. “Then, you get back in touch.”

Jon clutches the card in his hand and reads it twice over, a simple list of Elias’ contact information. It identifies him as _Head of the Magnus Institute_ , which raises a tiny spark of unease in Jon’s mind. He realises Elias never actually introduced himself beyond his name. Jon had just allowed himself to be swept along by this stranger in a suit, and told him every detail of the worst day of his life. 

Jon looks back up to find Elias going back to his notes. He gives Jon a small nod of dismissal. “Until we meet again.”

Jon stands there for a moment, card in hand, and feels momentarily so weary he doesn’t think he can walk. He is struck, once again, by the fact that his entire life, his entire worldview, can be altered so fundamentally from events that spanned less than an hour. He wonders if that will ever go away, whether if he does as Elias instructs, he’ll one day know enough to be immune to these kinds of shatterings. 

Jon walks slowly over to the door and out of the office. His grandmother looks up as he exits, rising from the chair where she’d been waiting, her expression somewhere between concern and impatience. “Alright?” she asks.

She seems to scan him for some kind of change, and Jon, for once, does not have room in his head to wonder whether she is hoping this visit will have put things to bed because he is much more of a bother when running on no sleep, or because she dislikes seeing him suffer. He gives her a tiny, hopeful smile, gripping the card tight in his hand, shielding it and reminding himself of its reality at the same time. “Bookshop?” he asks.

She returns his smile, seemingly in spite of herself. “Come on, then.”

Jon follows along, thinking of his new task to _learn voraciously_ , thinking of the monsters in the world and feeling something other than helpless. Behind him, he hears the click of the tape recorder switching off. 

**Author's Note:**

> Anyone else just thinking about A Guest for Mr Spider every day of their goddamn lives
> 
> I am not caught up on this podcast yet, so apologies for any inaccuracies...I did do some wiki research to check whether the...introductions made here could fit with the canon timeline, to which the answer seemed to be "yes, just about" 
> 
> Regardless, I am too busy loving baby jarchivist to know many things at all, and I invite you to join me in this pursuit


End file.
